"Bitter Ale for Bitter Times".
A foresightful, positive response to bad economic news. When the going gets bitter, the bitter resourceful crank up the hops:
A microbrewery in British Columbia is toasting the current economic downturn by launching a special brand of recession-style beer.Howe Sound Brewery has named its most bitter-tasting brew Bailout Bitter in honour of the government bailouts of the financial sector that have taken place in an attempt to mitigate the global financial crisis.
Calling it "bitter ale for bitter times," the brewery said the new beer will cost less than its other brands.
A pint of Bailout Bitter will sell for $5.50, or about $1 less per glass than other brews, at the company's restaurant and pub, located in Squamish, B.C., north of Vancouver.
[...]
"We are trying to inject a little bit of humour into this dire economic situation, while still responding in a serious way to these tough times," the brewery's co-owner, Leslie Fenn, said of the new brand.
Fenn said because the brewery is small, it can produce a timely new brand faster than its larger competitors.
The idea was hatched about two months ago, when impacts of the global financial crisis began, he said.
Mmmm, I do like me a good bitter ale. Wonder if they ship any across the border? Perhaps I could discuss this matter with the local ale-dealers.
At Lady Mondegreen's kennel. From a comment at Pam Spaulding's blog:
Great Post!
If only one thing comes out of this I hope it's that the assumption other minority groups will AUTOMATICALLY understand/empathize with our plight and issues gets nipped in the butt.
From here, via here.
Dragging Moira back to her own blog. M. has gotten into the habit of doing all of her writings in the comments sections of other peoples' blogs, off-shoring her commentary, if you will. Of course, this cheeses me off, because here I am, an aging, over-the-hill jester, frantically trying to wring a few last chuckles from the audience with my silly costume and jingly bells on the hat and pratfalls and such, all the while the alleged 'proprietress' is off giving commentary away for free. Well, I've had enough! I've decided that whenever Moira writes something somewhere else that (in my humble opinion) should have been a real blog post, I'm going to drag that commentary kicking and screaming back here, where it belongs.
To set the stage, M. Blowhard had asked:
"What the heck happened to the American economy in the late 1990s or thereabouts that killed off economic growth, apparently for at least a decade?
Was it:
- Y2K (maybe we should have taken it a lot more seriously?)
- Globalization and the loss of manufacturing jobs?
- The inevitable result of paying stagnating (or even falling) wages to the vast majority of the population as a short-sighted way of ensuring high corporate profits?
- Long term fallout from the notoriously IQ-lowering hit single, “Ooops, I Did It Again”?
Moira responded with:
I think the deadly X factor is a combination of your 2nd, 3rd, and last points. Though "globalization", of course, affects more than manufacturing jobs. (And there are economists and economic writers who have long been examining the long-term ill-effects of de-industrialization and the current globalization regime.)(By the way, Richard Thompson does a dynamite cover of "Oops....".)
Is the notion of perpetual economic growth in capitalist societies (not exactly a natural trend throughout most of human history) in need of revision? Was it just a temporary thing?
I've always been puzzled by this apparent belief in "infinite growth", though I'm sure the policy-makers pushing growth as an end in itself aren't thinking in terms of logical endpoints, but narrowly in terms of specific problems they may be responsible for - increasing tax revenues, funding Social Security, etc. - in the short term. Of course, one might think that people incapable of considering the larger, longer-term welfare of a nation ought not to be entrusted with policy-making power, even if we expect a private individual - say, the owner of a home-building corporation - to lobby for GROW GROW GROW GROW GROW!...
Sure, societies are always changing, evolving, hopefully advancing and improving human life. But infinite growth, which seems to be the preferred model for both companies and nation, is an impossibility.
I'll repeat the unoriginal observation that we more and more confuse "the economy" with society, because that confusion promotes lousy (disastrous?) policy. There do seem to be a lot of people out there who don't (or can't) recognize the distinction. (Why is that? Do they mistakenly take "everything else" in civilization as given, or is the scope of their inner lives really that narrow?
Sometimes I really wonder about people. For example, I came across some Australian policy article recently which illustrated this narrowness nicely. (Which of course I've lost track of. Iirc, the group appeared to be some sort of Chamber of Commerce type quango.) On the one hand, they were not happy with a current public policy encouraging reproduction, which had been instituted because families were too small and there weren't going to be enough people of working age to "grow the economy". You see, children are a net liability on the economy, an inefficient cost sink that have to be fed, housed, and educated before they start being economically productive. On the other hand, they were all gaga for turbo-charged immigration, because that way they could get all the good-to-go workers they needed to "grow the economy". Now, one would think that any human being not beset with terminal short-termitis (or maybe autism) would begin to pick out the flaws, both technical and social, in this sort of reasoning. But after you've read enough stuff like this, you stop thinking about the technical and logical flaws and start wondering, "Wtf is wrong with these people?" And after a while you begin wondering if they're not merely blinkered and unwise, but maybe just batshit insane.
How do we intend to handle the distribution of the goodies if the pie isn’t growing?
The current economic model was sold on the premise that it was "growing the pie". Naysayers were (and still are) castigated for foolishly believing that the system is a zero-sum game. Unfortunately, the last decade or so of "globalization" has been a zero-sum game for more and more American (and other First World) workers. (And some proponents have changed arguments in mid-stream, exhorting us that it's good that we've gotten poorer so other people can be richer. Which is fine to argue, honey, but that's not what you were selling when all this started.)
As for the non-growing pie, not sure how best to deal with that. The usual line on most of the left-leaning econo-blogs I read has been that it's a simple matter of making sure all the fabulous gains of globalization are fairly spread via government-controlled redistribution programs. I dunno. Crap wages and crap working conditions ameliorated by national health care seems a lousy exchange, and indicates a much uglier and less free life, than one in which a worker can command humane working conditions, and wages good enough to attend to his and his family's needs as a free man with free choice, and not a government client. But that's just me. I recognize that we were already far down this road before the '90s. But I don't have to like it.
Election Special (2008 'Boned either way' edition). Hmmm, I guess there's one of them there election thingys coming up in a few days. Guess it's time to look over the candidates...
Oh, crap. Isn't Halloween over?
McCain and Obama – I'm no happier now with this choice than I was back in February.
A lot of Obama's supporters appear quite taken with the man, which mystifies me – he strikes me as a smooth, bland politician, adept at reading speeches. (I appear to have some defect in this area – I have never been able to understand the appeal of any politician in anything other than policy areas.) I suspect that this blandness more easily allows his supporters to project their wishes and desires for a candidate onto him, and permits the sort of creepily ecstatic and millenial fervor that seems more common in this campaign than in any other I can remember. I suppose, though, that Obamaesque smoothness is preferable to McCain, America's Cranky Old Grandpa, mercurially charging off in favor of whatever shiny bauble happens to grab his attention at any given moment (trample the first amendment! save the bailout! pay everybody's mortgage! etc.)
"Change" is the big theme of this election, with both parties promising lots and lots of change. McCain has a harder time pulling this off, because it's pretty hard to ignore that the ship of state ran aground on the economic shoals with his colleague holding the tiller (not that they haven't tried). But, as far as I can see, Mr. O. and his colleagues would have held the ship of state on pretty much the exact same course, with occasional minor leftward corrections that would have done nothing to avert the current crises, because at a more fundamental level, both Obama and McCain both support the same basic status quo. As my AWOL co-blogger has said:
"McCain pretends (or actually believes) that we have a free market, not crony capitalism, and Obama will pretend that instituting a few more (corrupt, bureaucratically metastatizing) redistributive programs will mean that all those (strictly rethuglican, of course) plutocrats have been put on the run."I don't get the sense that either candidate appreciates the severity of the crisis that we appear to be in, or, if they do, has a solution that doesn't involve selling all our remaining assets to China, shipping all our remaining well-paying jobs to India (other than high finance and government, of course), and giving all our low-paying jobs to illegal aliens. After that, Obama will presumably give the restless populace bread and circuses 2.0 with all that wealth-spreading he proposes – I'm not clear on what McCain would do.
So I'm not sure what to do come Tuesday. I could truly embrace my new-found political crank nature and vote for some third-party candidate, except they're all crazy and/or odious. A dilemma.
Shameless plug II. The holiday that dare not mention its name, at The Ranting Kid.
Signs and portents. Saturday, Martha, our elderly across-the-street neighbor, was puttering about her front yard, and at the end of her session of raking and pruning, she walked up to the two McCain - Palin signs near the sidewalk, pulled them up, and put them in the garage.
I cocked my eyebrows. Was this the iceberg-tip of a silent, hidden trend? I almost shook off my sloth to fire up Movable Type and crank out a blog post:
Republican doom – McCain support in the heartland crumbles!
But I didn't.
This morning, Martha opened up the garage again and put the signs back up. Apparently she didn't want them blown away by the 60mph winds we had yesterday.
Surprise last minute surge – McCain comes storming back!
Revolutionaries. Us, that is, apparently. And not just revolutionary, but part of the very avant garde. Because we were in on this "dawning Age of Frugality" thing a long time ago. Business Week has just discovered a revolutionary cell in Pennsylvania:
"...a family of four lives in a white, colonial-style house in a manner that once would have been considered All-American but more recently has been seen as just plain weird: They're frugal."Well, we've definitely got the "weird" part down. And I think we'd count as "frugal", as well.
"They walk most everywhere, they rarely eat out, they sometimes buy clothing at consignment shops, and they turn the lights off when they leave a room."The horror!
These are all excerpted from a story about a family living what seems to me to be a thoroughly ordinary middle-class suburban American life. In fact, what strikes me most about their story isn't their cutting-edge revolutionary frugality, but rather their prior behavior, which, I suppose, may be average enough, but still caused alarm bells to go off in my head (alarm bells indicated by '!'):
"During the days of soaring home prices and easy credit, they took out a $101,000 home-equity loan(!) on a previous house and spent lavishly on a lifestyle upgrade—going on three cruises(!!) in two years and taking the kids on annual pilgrimages to Disney World(!). "After 9/11 it became patriotic to shop, and we became as patriotic as anybody," laments Behre, sitting in the dining room after a meal of chicken stir-fry—washed down with tap water(!)."Tap water? What is this ... tap water? Oh, that's right, the stuff I've drunk at home for the last 45 years.
Things nearly spun out of control after they upgraded to a better house. Despite raiding their retirement funds(!) to help with the down payment, they ended up with higher monthly payments.So, anyway, people such as those highlighted in the story, and, I guess, us, are now "harbingers of a dawning Age of Frugality", which apparently means living like normal prudent people.
"... baby-boomer children grew up without psychological scars from the Depression. And the boomers' children have come of age in an era of abundance, easy credit, and a taste for luxury. So it's no wonder that the sudden need for thrift comes as an upsetting shock for many. Some are calling for a massive public education effort on the level of the anti-drunk-driving and anti-smoking campaigns that have been so successful. "We want to build a culture that's more hospitable to thrift, so it's not seen as odd but fostered and nudged along," says Barbara Dafoe Whitehead, co-author of For a New Thrift: Confronting the Debt Culture, a new report from The Institute for American Values, a think tank."What I'd really like to see is a culture where people don't give a ...hoot about being seen as odd, or living within their means... but barring that, I suppose that re-learning the lessons of the Depression will do. It's odd, though; both M. and I have parents that grew up during the Depression, and while they never obsessed about it, they clearly knew the value of money and how not to waste it, and for the most part I see M. and I as having learned that lesson from them, however imperfectly. I'm not sure why we were able to absorb that cautionary tale and so many others apparently were not.
To be sure, there are odd moments on the journey to a thriftier lifestyle. To demonstrate, Bill Behre pulls out a mobile phone and twists it back and forth so the light glints off of rhinestones glued on by daughter Annie before she got a new phone. Behre's own phone was ruined in a rainstorm, so he's using this gaudy hand-me-down until he can get a free replacement in March. "This is the ultimate in frugal," he says.Ditch the cell phone, and then get back to me about "frugal", ok? Jeez.
Sticking to the program requires vigilance. When Ingram does drive, she calculates the relative costs of traveling a few more miles to get gas for a few cents cheaper (I thought everybody did this– DF). ...In the old days, the family overspent their checking account by an average of $300 a month—dipping into the home-equity funds to make up the difference(!!!). Now they're in the black by about $800 a month. Since making their big changes, they accelerated payments on a car loan and managed to pay it off. ...That's why we aren't worldly successes, Moira: we haven't yet learned to hector others about the bleedin' obvious. We should write a book!
Ingram has started a blog, The Lean Green Family, where she encourages others to be more frugal.
"I hope that someone else gets it, because I don't." Professional investor guy Jeremy Grantham on the current unpleasantness:
I have a theory that people who find themselves running major-league companies are real organization-management types who focus on what they are doing this quarter or this annual budget. They are somewhat impatient, and focused on the present. Seeing these things requires more people with a historical perspective who are more thoughtful and more right-brained -- but we end up with an army of left-brained immediate doers.
So it's more or less guaranteed that every time we get an outlying, obscure event that has never happened before in history, they are always going to miss it. And the three or four-dozen-odd characters screaming about it are always going to be ignored.
If you look at the people who have been screaming about impending doom, and you added all of those several dozen people together, I don't suppose that collectively they could run a single firm without dragging it into bankruptcy in two weeks. They are just a different kind of person.
So we kept putting organization people -- people who can influence and persuade and cajole -- into top jobs that once-in-a-blue-moon take great creativity and historical insight. But they don't have those skills.
[...]
I want to emphasize how little I understand all of the intricate workings of the global financial system. I hope that someone else gets it, because I don't. And I have no idea, really, how this will work out. I certainly wish it hadn't happened. It is just so intricate that all I can conclude, by instinct and by reading the history books, is that it will be longer, harder and more than we expect.
[From here, via here.]
Monkey Butlers!
BART
And every night the monkey butlers will regale us with jungle stories.
NELSON
How many monkey butlers will there be?
BART
One at first. But he'll train others.
[Via Althouse.]
Derek's Hard Times - or, Hey, This is My Ice Floe, Go Find Your Own. Derek Lowe's recent Hard Times: A Manifesto caught my eye in part because, with the judicious replacement of the words "chemist" and "drug research" with "software" and "software development", the issues it raises are identical to those that come up in my neck of the woods. The 'hard times' of the title refers to the bleakening prospects of native-born American pharmaceutical chemists, as the big pharms downsize and ship R & D overseas.
Boiled down to its sticky residue, Derek's main point is as follows:
Everyone knows – including the people in Shanghai and Hyderabad – that the difficult, high-level research is still not being done there. [Routine chemistry] is definitely cheaper to do outside the country... on the average, you can bang out compounds for less money by outsourcing. That’s not going to change, either.All of these arguments apply, pretty much one-for-one, to the making of computer software as well. In my experience, a lot of the 'simple' stuff has already gone to Mumbai or Hyderabad. What's left behind, mainly, is the high-end work, things that people really need advanced degrees for; fundamental software design and new product research; marketing; and management.
So what’s left for us here in the US? The hard stuff. The risky stuff. The science that needs well-paid experienced people hovering over it the whole time. We get to take on the stuff that can’t be outsourced.
This is ... a terrible time to be an ordinary chemist in this industry. That goes for the ordinary biologists, too. We’ve all got to demonstrate why we’re worth what we want to earn, and doing something that can be done for half the price somewhere else isn’t going to cut it.
For the most part, it's true that right now this stuff – a lot of it, at least – "can't be outsourced". Aspiring programmers have to come to Western universities just to get trained to do the work, and so there just isn't the critical mass of experienced engineers | programmers | developers | whatever in our offshore locations to enable the bean-counters to send the work over there.
Of course, eventually, as other countries develop large populations of programmers, and those programmers gain experience, it seems pretty reasonable to think that the high-end advantage of the U.S. and other western countries will steadily erode, and the list of things that "can't be outsourced" will steadily shrink along with it. The market for U.S. programmers – or chemists – would necessarily seem to shrink. Not sure what the strategy will be then.
Technical difficulties, please stand by... You would think, would you not, that now, September 2008, right now, with the world embroiled in wars, a presidential election campaign in full swing that, regardless of outcome, will have historic©! consequences, with global financial structures and institutions crashing down around our heads – a time, in short, that future schoolchildren will read about in their history books, books which they hopefully will be able to read by something other than candlelight or the light given off by the family furniture as it is burned for heat, a time that definitely lives up to that fictitious Chinese curse about interesting times – surely, right now would be the time to furiously tap-tap-tap away at the keyboard, recording the reactions of us peons out here in flyover country to the creaks and groans of the mighty juggernaut History as it rolls over us.
Yeah, well, it ain't happening. My desktop PC is lying in little pieces down in the basement, awaiting an emergency CPU transplant from Crazy Eddie's CPU Barn, and Moira's entering her 15th month of blogger's block. (Well, not exactly. What she actually said was more like, "If I write what I think, then everyone will assume I'm crazy." Join the club, dear.) History will have to trundle along without our commentary for the moment.
Palin significance. Trampling our "political blog" status further in the dust, M. and I both pretty much blew off paying attention to the D.'s and R.'s conventions during the last two weeks. Ok, there was one exception: I did turn on the TV to watch Palin's big speech. This had the immediate effect of driving M. from the room, muttering something along the lines of "Oh God, I am not watching this garbage."
I could somewhat see her point, not being particularly thrilled with either of the major parties or their offerings at the moment. But I felt I knew about the three other main players, and Palin was completely unknown to me. As a responsible citizen and all that, should I not familiarize myself? Besides, it isn't often you get to see such a ... a... (searching for proper astronomical metaphors here – comets? meteors? novas? ah, yes, de stella nova, that's it) a rapid and explosive rise to prominence in the political universe, accompanied by tremendous blasts of hot gas. I was assured by right-sided commentators that Gov. Palin was a great speechmaker, what with all the sportscaster and beauty-pageant training, and besides, she's so effin' hawt!!! Meanwhile, the leftosphere was doing its best to make Palin into a combination of Daisy Mae Scragg and Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS. Either way, it was clear that this would be an important moment in the whole campaign.
Reaction? My first thought was, Hey, she sounds just like the school secretary in 'Ferris Bueller's Day Off' (not that there's anything wrong with that). Then she introduced the family, which seemed to go on for a long time, but I guess that's fair, since nobody knew anything about them less than a week before. Then she got into the meat of things, and it was a pretty good speech, by modern political standards, which is to say it wasn't really very good, but it was better than most. To be fair, I think the convention can take some of the blame for that, because the audience was so pumped up on adrenaline and MSM-hatin' that they cheered practically every sentance, whether it formed a whole thought or not. The basic pattern seemed to be: {bumper-sticker political thought} wild cheering and applause {bumper-sticker political thought} wild cheering and applause {bumper-sticker political thought} etc....
Again, I didn't catch any other speech at either convention, so evaluating this one out of its context may not be fair, and certainly most people seem to agree that it was a good speech. It just didn't make me sit up on the couch and say, "Damn, that was a good speech". (Full disclosure: the last time I did have that reaction was to Bill Clinton's acceptance of the nomination in 1992.) She's a good public speaker, with a relaxed and conversational tone. I thought the line about Obama's styrofoam columns was pretty good, as was the "community organizer" jab. "Too sarcastic?" Right. Whine some more, I'm sure America really finds that attractive in a candidate.
A visitor from Mars, listening to the speech and its railling against the Washington status quo, would probably think that no Republican had had a hand in the federal government for the past decade or so, and I suppose that goes hand-in-glove with McCain's "I'm an outsider! Really!!" schtick. But it's not really a schtick in Palin's case, is it? At the moment, she really does appear to be a truly novel thing on the political landscape, a genuine non-establishment, non-elite outsider.
What does all this mean for me as a voter? I don't know. Probably not much, as Palin's not running for President, despite the efforts of the D's to convince me that McCain is going to keel over dead on the afternoon of Jan. 20th, 2009. As I noted some time ago, I disagree considerably with McCain, Obama, and Biden on most policy issues, and Palin at the moment looks like a younger Phyllis Schlafly*. Perhaps if someone can convince me that she's really Margaret Thatcher with a hunting license, it might cause me to view McCain less disfavorably.**
*Not a good thing.
**Do. Not. Like.
Tech notes from all over. To be perfectly honest, we pay very little attention to our server logs. Not, of course, because it would be too depressing to contemplate the meager trickle of visitors, but because we are simply too insouciant to care about such petty things. Really. It's fine. Don't visit. See if we care!.... Hey! Come back!
Anyway, on those extremely rare occasions when I do peek at the logs, I notice that a fair number of Google-referred hits are the result of someone looking for some kind of SuSE or generic Linux information. Just to be of service to those lost, desperate souls, I suppose I should occasionally post something Linux-oriented. So here's this year's tip:
Say, for instance, that you use libgphoto2 and gphoto2 to allow your digital camera to interface with your computer, and also say that this set up usually just works, requiring no further mucking around on your part. Perhaps, after months of just working, the connection starts to fail, intermittently at first, but then regularly, to the point that every attempt to connect the camera to the computer results in the following plaint from gphoto2:
Error (-114: 'OS error in camera communication')Nothing.
I raged at the camera and computer some more, and popped in some brand new, just-bought-at-the-store-this-week batteries.... and all was happy again. O frabjous day! (Incidentally, the old batteries still had plenty of power to run the camera. Apparently, the USB connection has pretty major power requirements, relatively speaking.)
On a less happy note, I notice this week that Alcatel-Lucent is shutting down Bell Labs. Yes,
that Bell Labs. Now, that's depressing.
Let us join together in a glorious monochrome rainbow.
We now know that the appropriate compensation for each individual case of Anglo-Irish abuse is €20,000. The average annual population of Ireland has been, say, 5m, with many millions more abroad. If one multiples that over the last 600 years, then brings a class action on behalf of the entire Irish race for racial abuse at the hands of the English, I estimate that we are entitled to a compensation package of about €13 trillion.Amusing, but to nitpick, the tort that the referenced compensation was to amend was actually for Irish-Anglo abuse, i.e., the abuse of Britons by Irishmen. No reason to assume that compensation for the reverse case (Anglo-Irish abuse) would be symmetrical. A further nit: the article recycles the hoary old No Irish Need Apply story, which seems to have very little there there.*
The most interesting feature of the piece from which the quote comes, at least to this U.S. reader, is the apparent subsumption of all ethnic, tribal, and national animosities under the blanket term "racism". As in, "Is it possible that we harbour such a deep-seated resentment against the English that we have become blind to our own racism?" This is apparently some Irish guy talking here, talking about the English. The few commenters seem to agree that yes, a pasty-white Irishman taking a piss on the pasty-white English is racist!
Just as "fascist" evolved from "proponent of a nationalistic, authoritarian political movement with populist overtones" to "any person I disagree with", "racist" seems to be moving from "proponent of legal, moral or ethical distinctions of people based on race" to "somebody who dislikes something based on any cultural distinction whatsoever." And in a few decades I guess it will get to "any person I disagree with" also.
*Disclaimer: Yes, Irish in North America and England abused, treated poorly, etc. Not relevant.
And apropos of that last post, Mr. Fitzgerald helps keep a sense of proportion:
The Marxist, Marcusian and Sartrian dialectics that inspired the students in France, Germany, Britain and the USA in 1968 have been completely discredited as amoral, selfish posturing. The truly revolutionary idea of that year was the notion of human rights that inspired the captive peoples of the Soviet bloc to protest in public and risk imprisonment, exile or death.
At a time when the spoiled brats of 1968 are being romanced for their excesses, we should all make a vow that when the 50th anniversary of that seminal year comes around it is not the opponents of freedom who will be honoured, but its defenders. They faced down the tanks; they went to Siberia. They started a revolution that spread from Prague to Red Square and beyond. They were the real revolutionaries.
All your oppressive machinery is powerless against my tinfoil underpants.
As someone who has always been intrigued by social uses for sound technology, I couldn't let this latest, ah, tidbit* pass by unnoticed. It seems that some of the professionally-aggrieved community got hold of an old urban legend (I remember it from my undergrad days) and have turned it into another Dastardly Plot by the Man:
Political activists planning protest rallies at the upcoming Democratic Convention in Denver have their stomachs in knots over a rumor about a crowd control weapon - known as the “crap cannon” - that might be unleashed against them.The rest of the article (Danger! Fox News!) comprises the moonbat ravings of eternal adolescents Mark Cohen and Glenn Spagnuolo (how dare they use this ficticious weapon on us!) and the bemused denials of just about, well, everybody.
Also called “Brown Note,” it is believed to be an infrasound frequency that debilitates a person by making them defecate involuntarily.
Dr. Roger Schwenke - an expert acoustician who appeared on the Discovery Channel’s “Mythbusters” in 2004 to test the phenomenon - told FOXNews.com there is no scientific evidence that proves such frequencies cause involuntary defecation.Mere reality can't compete with fantasies of persecution, though.
“When we conducted the low frequency experiment for the Brown Note episode of MythBusters, we tested a variety of low frequencies and no involuntary gastro-intestinal motility was caused,” he said.
But Schwenke acknowledged the low-frequency exposure did cause an adverse effect. Several people — including himself — reported “abdominal discomfort,” he said, “which was easily alleviated by moving a moderate distance away from the source.”
In addition to purely fictional weapons, the local tantrum-throwing community has decided to worry about real but esoteric and highly improbable ones, such as the Active Denial System, which emits a beam of microwave radiation that heats the surface of the skin sufficiently to cause a sensation of extreme heat, without burning or damaging tissues (at least, that's the idea). It's supposed to help deter potentially hostile people without injury at distances beyond the reach of small-arms fire. "Spagnuolo believes that Raytheon, the company that manufactures the [ADS], is planning to test a limited-range civilian version on protesters in Denver before approving its use in places like Iraq." Wait – wouldn't it be even more dastardly, more evil, to test it on little foreign people first, before unleashing it on the brave truth-to-power-speakers of Re-create 68? No accounting for the ways of the wicked, I guess.
Unlike the 'crap cannon', the ADS might make it to Iraq eventually, but it's still undergoing tests (presumably not on the streets of Denver). And not to worry, Mssrs. Cohen & Spagnuolo – it can be easily counteracted:
Countermeasures against the weapon could be quite straightforward — for example covering up the body with thick clothes or carrying a metallic sheet — or even a trash can lid — as a shield or reflector. Also unclear is how the active-denial technology would work in rainy, foggy or sea-spray conditions where the beam's energy could be absorbed by water in the atmosphere.But just to be sure, I'd recommend a full-body tinfoil wrap.
UPDATE: Gitmo on the Platte! Will the oppression never stop? Where are your metallic undergarment friends now?
*Via some commenter on an Ann Althouse thread; link lost in the mists of the Firefox cache.
Qoute of the day, mid-campaign edition.
Lots of "I'm shocked! shocked!" Nobody's really shocked. This is a fight to the death for power and the distribution of wealth. It is about ideology only to the extent that ideologies are masks for interests. Of course each contender is going to do whatever it takes to win, within the vague and shifting limits set by public revulsion... So, to put it as crudely as possible: the rich don't want to be taxed; the poor want more handouts; and everybody in between is trying to figure out whether life is better for them (us) under the frankly powerful or under those whose power derives from purporting to represent the interests of the powerless.
Too much truth in advertising, perhaps.
Flipping through the channels on the treadmill yesterday, I chanced on CNBC right when a commercial for some entity named PowerShares came on. The ad was flogging their new ETF, which will specialize in "a global wind energy portfolio". The NASDAQ stock ticker symbol?
PWND.
Probably not a whole lot of leet-speakers over at PowerShares.
(Partial explanation of joke here; example here.)
Being one's own worst enemy. Rand Simberg links to a piece in Salon.com about the current antics of PZ Myers. I've been vaguely aware of Myers and his web site for some time; he seemed to be a compentent developmental biologist. He was pretty active in countering a lot of creationist nonsense back in the dawn epoch of the blogosphere, and helped to make Panda's Thumb a good site for evolution-related information.
Lately, however, Myers seems to have acquired a new mission; he decided that he was going to show all those stupid religious people just how stupid they are, and that this will cause the scales to fall from their eyes, and they will thenceforth no longer be stupid. (I admit I'm guessing about that last part. Really, it's not clear to me what the point of his cracker perforation stunt was. I'm tempted to believe that he is just reveling in his lately-found role of Big Bad Atheist – based on photos on his website, it apparently is allowing him to meet hot atheist chicks.)
Back in the early 90's, I happened to be eating dinner one night with a couple of fellow grad students as well as some of the faculty, and we got into a discussion about Richard Dawkins, whose "Blind Watchmaker" had come out a few years before. The general consensus, as I remember, was that Dawkins was a dogmatic asshole, but he might be a necessary dogmatic asshole to counteract the d.a.'s of the creationists. Without tireless haranguers like Dawkins around, the argument went, biologists would have no equivalent to the likes of Phillip Johnson or Michael Behe.
Over time, though, Dawkins switched over from defending and promoting the study of biological evolution to attacking theistic religion, which I'm sure he probably sees as consistent, logical, even necessary, but makes him sound like the lead debater for the local Junior High Atheist's Club. PZ Myers seems to be angling for the Dawkins mini-me spot with the cracker stunt, and glorying in all the vituperative e-mail showered upon him by dimwitted Catholics.
"Question everything. God is not great, Jesus is not your lord, you are not disciples of any charismatic prophet" Myers says, but I would guess the likelihood of anybody being jolted into the light of Reason by virtue of his stunt would hover somewhere around zero. More likely, Myers has reinforced the stereotype of the arrogant scientist in the minds of those he sought to antagonize, which doesn't seem like progress. "...people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion," says Myers. Ah, but there's the rub – where's Myers' proof that religion makes people stupid – or rather, stupider? Why does Myers think that taking taking religion away from the stupid would make them less stupid or harmful? Perhaps a world of stupid, irreligious people would be even nastier than a world of stupid religious people?
Which leads to another grad school culinary flashback, this time at a sidewalk teriyaki joint eating with a labmate and the labmate's mother, in town for a visit. The mother, a prim, petite woman, after giving me a short history of her life, told me in a charming German accent, "In the old days, the stupid people had religion. Now, they just have television." The truth of the comment didn't really hit me then, but since I have seen it in operation a hundred times.*
*Not television sensu stricto. "Politics" works as well, as would many other things.
Airplanes, zooming in and out.
Perhaps I've not paid attention in the past, but It seems that we've had an unusual number of airplane-related events going on in Our Fair Town this year. Well, ok, two. There were the barnstormers mentioned previously, and then on Friday, while heading out to the local Indian restaurant for lunch, I looked up towards the horizon and thought to myself, Hey, what's that big four-engined prop plane up there? I assumed it was probably an aerial tanker for fire-fighting, and let it go at that, although a few more seconds of thought would probably have led me to realize that there isn't much call for aerial fire-fighting around these parts.
Saturday afternoon, whilst sitting slack-jawed in front of my computer, I heard a low droning, growing louder and louder, until it finally occurred to me that an unusually large prop plane was nearby. Looking up at the sky, I eventually saw the thing fly right overhead – a B-17, a real, live, flying B-17, guns and all. Some quick Googling turned up the information that it was the Commemorative Air Force's Sentimental Journey, in town for the weekend, offering tours and flights. This wasn't something that Moira or I could pass up.
The offspring could pass it up, however. Moira and I both being of rather geekly persuasion, I personally always have tended to equate intelligence with passionate interest in airplanes, space, submarines, dinosaurs, rocks, etc., and the Ranting Spawn has frequently brought me up short by her singular lack of passionate interest in any of these things (except dinosaurs), despite being pretty darn smart. Anyway, Moira and I continued on alone, and drove out to the airport.
The plane was just sitting there, on the tarmac. It fascinated me that a rare (fewer than 10 flight-worthy B-17's exist today) museum-quality relic like this would be so accessible; just walk up and touch it, pay your $5 and climb up the hatch, unsupervised.
The inside is very cramped, and smells of gasoline and grease, like a car mechanic's repair bay. 
This is the view out the nose, past the bombardier's seat. The navigator sits just to the left, where he has a small map table to work at. I assume the machine gun to the left is for the bombardier when he wasn't at his bombing duties; a similar, but asymmetrically-placed gun is on the right side, where the navigator can fire it. I don't know who controlled the two guns in the turret beneath the nose.
Here's the view from the pilot's seat:
| (I thought the Boeing logo on the pilot's yoke was a nice touch.) |  |
Just behind the pilot and co-pilot the belts of the top turret's twin machine guns hang down. These were manned by the flight engineer, when he wasn't doing whatever it is flight engineers did, back in the days when planes had flight engineers.
An extremely narrow catwalk, about wide enough for an actual cat, runs down the middle of the bomb bay and provides the only access from the front to the back of the plane. Just behind the bomb bay and catwalk, the radio operator has a relatively spacious compartment, beyond which is the mechanism that runs the ball turret. (Despite the general impression of ball turret gunner as being just about the suckiest job in WWII, their survival rate was apparently relatively high, which I suppose is partial recompense for the horrific unpleasantness of being cooped up in a ball turret for hours on end.)
The gun above is for the left waist gunner; another is set up for the right waist gunner. I hadn't realized that aside from the pilot and co-pilot, everybody on the plane had at least one machine gun to fire; the radio operator's was retracted beneath a plexiglas fairing in the roof, which could be opened if necessary.
| This is the top of the ball turret, from inside: |  |
 | And this is the open hatch of the ball turret, from outside. The picture makes it look much, much larger than it really is. "Cramped" doesn't begin to describe it. Unfortunately, my camera batteries were running low by this point, and putting its own self-preservation above my photographic wishes, the camera refused to take flash pictures. |
And flights? Well, the flights were a wee bit expensive. As in, $425 per person, minimum five passengers expensive. (One of the mechanics said that given the cost of fuel, requiring five passengers allowed them to break even on the flights.) Despite the cost, they had the requisite number of passengers by 11:00am. They started the engines, one at a time.
The engines burn a lot of oil.
After starting each engine in turn, the plane taxied off to the runway, ran through its pre-flight check, and began its takeoff roll.
And then it was off:
Hey, these content-free posts are kind of fun. Latest quote of the day (well, yesterday, really):
I would support a law to make all candidates write and draw their own issue-position comic.Of course, what the commenter didn't specify is that for this policy to have full effect, the candidates must write and draw these comics by themselves, without illustrators or policy consultants. Hmmm... crayon, or pencil?
Shameless plug.
State Fairs! Hurricanes! Canadians! Swastikas! all at The Ranting Kid.
Quotes o' the day, economics edition. Pithy, punchy quotes to start your day and hide our total lack of new original content. Or display it. Whatever.
"Unfortunately, the dynamics are such that when central planning fails, you typically get more central planning."
(From here. )
"Once we have a bubble to provide a fragile foundation, we can begin building pyramid scheme on top of pyramid scheme, and before we know it, the financial situation will return to normal."
The Great Prognosticator, return'd. Back in February, I think I said something to the effect of this fall's election boiling down to a choice between either Clinton or Romney, which of course had to be slightly amended when Romney pulled out — but, even then, I had great trust in Hillary's political machinations to pull off a nomination. Alas, my prognosticatory reputation is lain in the dust, as I now have to grant that the likelihood of Clinton getting the nomination is, umm, low.
That makes me 0 for 2 in the candidate-prediction department, which is not exactly a stellar record, but I can squeeze that lemon to lemonade: a stopped clock may be right only twice a day, but re: presidential predictions I have a solid, 100% record. I am always, 100%, wrong. Surely this extreme inaccuracy can be turned to something positive.
...
Well, I'll come up with something. In the meantime, as a public service, I can reveal the name of the candidate whom my gut tells me we will be calling "Mr. President" next year: John McCain. Note that this is not an endorsement, or anything like it; it's just a gut feeling, and is by definition un-analyzable. (If I analyzed it, it wouldn't be "gut" anymore, right?) So, given my 100% prior record of inaccuracy, I guess that means Mr. Obama should start measuring the Oval Office for new drapes.
In our fridge, we've got the meat shelf, the dairy shelf, the human body parts shelf... The Des Moines Register has a lengthy (for the Des Moines Register) piece on the long history of safety violations at Agriprocessors, Inc,, Iowa's home-grown illegal immigration scandal. The sheer panty-waistedness of the governmental inspectors assigned to oversee the company is astonishing:
Unsigned workplace-safety complaints are typically investigated by the state via telephone or fax, rather than by visiting the plant. In one case, inspectors drove to the Postville plant and were denied entry. After realizing the complaint was unsigned, the inspectors drove back to Des Moines without entering the plant.(Emphasis mine.) So somebody putting products into the public food supply can just tell inspectors to buzz off? Fascinating. Of course, that sort of dereliction pales in comparison to the apparent utter disregard of the plant operators for worker safety. Kinda makes me wonder if their meatballs were really kosher after all.
(N.B.: you probably don't want to read the Register article immediately before eating.)
Diary of July 4th. 7:00am. Wake up. Beautiful cool sunny morning, following cool starry night. Have only had to turn on the AC twice so far this year. Gladdens our miserly shriveled hearts.
7:15am. Second good thing of the day – successfully outlasted Moira in the morning who's-going-to-get-up-and-make-the-coffee competition. Mmmm, she makes some fine coffee.
9:00am. Assist Ranting Spawn in preparing for picnic lunch.
10:00am. Head out in search of adventure. Our destination is this place, surprisingly close to the teeming metropolis of Des Moines.
11:30am. Arrive at wildlife refuge's impressively large and thoroughly unpopulated visitor center, greet visitor center attendants, who eagerly offer to turn on the lights at the visitor center for us.
11:31am. Decline offer, set out on trail in search of:
11:33am. See buffalo:
While the buffalo are, up to a point, "free roaming", and we ourselves were roaming freely, our populations were kept separate by the fence, and so I was unable to get a close picture. Also, still not deeply conversant with the intricacies of our digital camera, I didn't notice that the auto-focus feature was frequently choosing to ignore the buffalo in favor of nearby grasses.
12:30pm. Set off in futile search for shady spot for picnic. Defeated by prairie's general treelessness, and road construction. End up in park about 2 minute's drive from home.
3:00pm.Watched the first two episodes of HBO's miniseries about John Adams, especially appropriate today, as the second episode ends with a reading of the Declaration of Independence. (Well, in truth we also watched the 3rd episode, but that ends with Adams bedridden, feverish and delirious, so we'll just leave that part out.) At one point, slipped into ranting-old-man mode and remarked to the offspring that the entire populations of the current legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government combined haven't the worth of a single one of the persons on screen – Franklin, Jefferson, Washington, Adams (John or Abigail), or even John Dickinson. Harrumph repeatedly. Where would we find such people now?
6:00pm. Take bitter comfort in realizing that despite all that, at least the U.S. has not sunk to the level of petty-minded governmental meddling represented by this:
Gateshead Council defended its decision. A spokesman said: ‘Research carried out by us discovered customers were often receiving huge quantities of salt with their fish and chips – up to half their daily allowance. The council was so disturbed it decided to commission a manufacturer to produce a salt shaker with fewer holes, which it distributed free to every fish and chip shop and hot food takeaway in Gateshead...'We believe the cost to be a small price to pay for potentially saving lives.’
6:10pm. Tried to imagine local city government attempting such a thing. Failed. Wonder: what has happened to the British, compared to the state of political thought in 1776, that their governments can even conceive of such a thing? Is a man's chip shop no longer his castle?
8:00pm. Go to see local fireworks. Forget camera.
Put down the thesaurus, sir, and back away with your hands up. Last night's thunderstorms did more than just dump more rain, apparently:
Thunderstorms lambasted northern Missouri and sections of central Illinois producing 6- to 8-inch rain totals in a region still reeling from flooding and wet ground.Unmentioned is the severe castigation delivered to southeast Iowa, and the blistering tongue-lashing given to Michigan.
The money just ... vanishes. That's the only explanation I can come up with for this reasoning:
“I think there is a misconception in many communities that these [illegal] immigrants are taking American dollars and sending it all back home,” Eathington said. “This really isn’t the case, because these people still pay sales taxes, rent and buy food. In some towns, they make up a significant percent of revenue that goes back into the community.”And if we somehow discouraged illegal immigrants from taking those jobs, apparently the money that would have been paid them just leaves the economy entirely, *poof*. 'Cause if you had paid it to a legal worker, instead of "pay[ing] sales taxes, rent and buy[ing] food", they would have just buried that money in a pickle jar in the back yard. Or burned it for heat, or something.
The same reasoning can be seen at work in a Travel Industry Association "study" that USA Today reported on last month: Consumers pick home over flying; avoided trips cost economy billions.
The more than 100,000 trips a day that don't happen because of the hassle factor cost the U.S. economy an estimated $26.5 billion in forgone travel spending, TIA President Roger Dow said Thursday.I can relate – Moira and I were going to go to Oregon this summer, but then we thought about the packing hassle and the airport hassle and the tiny-seat-pitch hassle, so we took all the money we would have spent and mulched it into our garden (all those cotton fibers – great for the soil!).
Flying machines. Our little town is a dry island amidst the floodwaters, and as such attracted these people, who were flooded out of Iowa City and so spent an extra two days here. The skies are quiet now, but for four days the air buzzed with biplanes.
Despite the name, there wasn't any actual barnstorming going on, even though we have a plethora of barns laying about the area. What there was a lot of was old planes on display:
Each plane had a plaque that listed its specifications and individual history. Most were built, initially, in the late 20's or early 30's, but had undergone extensive renovations since then. (These histories were interesting, given that I had just read Donald Pittinger's comments on plane restoration.)
This gives you a pretty good idea of the age distribution in attendance.
Also, for a mere $50 per person, they offered the tantalizing opportunity to take a ride in one of the planes. We were sorely tempted, but did not give in, because we are cheap and dull people. Here is one of the Travel Air 4000's coming in to pick up new passengers:
And here's my only image of one of the planes in the air, as it comes in for a landing. (This image strained the abilities of our little 4.0 megapixel workhorse to the limit.)
One of my co-workers rode the biplane, so to speak, and said it was a lot of fun. Maybe someday...
